Blog Prabir Kumar Sen about Optimo Primes on “Balaram Kando”

It has an interesting story actually. On our first meeting with the core team of Director, Producer, Story writer and myself, the director had basically two kind of ideas. The primary one was a dark thriller while the other one was a comedy drama family movie, which is Balaram Kando. After a huge discussion within with both the Director and Producer, we have decided to lock this comedy drama. After that we had visited the location in a place call Nainital, which is located in the northern region of India. A beautiful hill town consisting of beautiful valleys and some beautiful lakes. The primary brief for this Bengali comedy drama feature film was from the very beginning that it should look visually very vibrant, high key joyous look which will complement the story along with the beautiful location.

But here I had put some of my artistic decision for the visual to be more refreshing and interesting. See in most of the cases this comedy drama high key look films have an almost evenly lit lighting conditions which I personally don’t like. So, what I did as a young DP is in first place quite risky, but I stick on the idea to keep a basic contrast but I distributed the light of every scene in a ratio that in spite of having contrast, each frame looks vibrant. For example what I tried to do, I always wrap the light on highlight for example, say with 3 lights. And on one of the highlight source I always push it near the higher dynamic range with a strong back light. This idea of always trying to have an extra punch on the highlight worked for me and my Director which I could see in his happy face on the set.

In this eastern part of India a basic constraint in commercial filmmaking is the budget. This constraint comes with its own challenges like we have to shoot very fast, even very fast sounds less, I should say super fast. Like we have shot this entire 2 hour film in 11 days without any left out scenes within a hill station. So we have highly expert technicians in our Bengali film industry, from electricians to best boy and light boys, super sorted chief AC to focus puller and like this in every department from directorial to sound, costume to production, to handle this problem and meet the deadline very fast with a high quality output.
So needless to mention, in this scenario we also need that high quality equipment to meet this condition.
In the case of Balaram Kando there was another constraint added which was unpredictable weather of hills. In no time a sunny weather turns into a thunderstorm and again it comes back to sunny weather. So we had to fight a lot in outdoors with the weather and time.
So Optimo Prime’s ergonomics helps a lot in this given condition. Like its light weight small housing compared to other lenses of this kind, helped to keep on the fast pace of the shoot. The fine contrast tuning helped a bit in constantly changing outdoor conditions to maintain the contrast ratio, which I leave carefree for the post. Which I think with other lenses of this range could have given me a bit of trouble.

Firstly the flare handling of Optimo Prime helped me to put the back light carefreely in some cases nearer to the lens. In that case I was getting a superb back light on the character but no halation on the top of the frame.
Secondly, the balance of sharpness and soft details on the skin tone helped me a lot to get this desired look. Another thing was very cool, that was the quality of the bokeh I was getting in the depth was quite impressive for me.
I got the odd series from equipment supplier house and I also prefer the odd series usually. I mostly use the 40mm and 75mm. As I have a tendency to go for unusual options as a habit, that psychi drives me to choose these two focal length most of the time I guess.
By then I want to express some experience about the lens;
Firstly, the fall of the optimo prime lens has a very refreshing sharpness yet a cinematic smoothness in the skintones. And I must say the skintone I got in different complexions was very much detailed and next to real apart from other lenses of this range.

Secondly, the fall of the lens also impressed me, I wanted a refreshing high key look with 1:2 contrast ratio in which I was expecting a lens which would give me cinematic sharpness in the center and a gradual defocus on the side of the frames on any given aperture. I tested Supreme primes, Master primes, Ultra primes and ultimately I had stuck with the Optimo primes which gave me the exact desired feature I wanted.

Then comes the next point about the flare handling capacity of the lens. Optimo prime doesn’t break the light rays near to the lens which create an unwanted halation on the top of the frame and breaks the contrast. It handles the light nearer or directly to lens very sharply which gives the image a sharp tone as the flares are pretty sharp and do not break the light rays.

My 4th point would be the size and weight of the lens. Despite having so many characteristics that were supporting my visualization, the lens is quite light weight and smaller than other lenses around this range. Which helps in run and gun shooting, even in case of handheld shot taking also. As the weight of the lens is so less, the weight distribution is very handy with Mini LF kind of cameras.
So far these are the points that help me choose Optimo Primes setup according to my visual that complements my storyline.